A local food system is one in which foods are produced,
processed and retailed within a defied geographical area.
Examples of local food systems are: farmers markets, farmgate sales, vegetable box delivery schemes, community
supported agriculture and public procurement schemes
which source food from within a defied geographical radius.
The foods which are exchanged within local food systems
are usually those which are traceable to a particular place
of origin, and have distinctive qualities or characteristics.
They are oftn unprocessed or lightly processed foods. There
is as yet no legally agreed defiition of local food, nor of
the geographical scale of the ‘local’. The local is always
experienced and understood in relation to larger geographical
scales, such as the regional, national or global. The question
of where the local area ends and another scale begins is
subjective, depending on context (density of populations,
accessibility and rural or urban character for example) and
purpose. For example, supermarkets operating at national
and international scales oftn describe a whole region or
even country as a ‘local’ source (CPRE, 2002). Research in
the UK, for instance, has found that people understand what
‘local’ means in diffrent ways – see Box 1.